ERRORS OF THEORETICAL WRITERS REGARDING THE SAVAGE STATE.
No question has, in as far as I can apprehend the subject, been so utterly misunderstood and misrepresented as the one relating to the customs and traditional laws of savage races. Deistical writers and philosophers of great note but small experience have built up whole theories, and have either overturned or striven to overturn ancient faiths and wholesome laws by arguments deduced, in the first instance, from the consideration of man in his simple or savage state; and from false premises they have deduced, logically, argument from argument, until even the most unwilling have begun to doubt.
COMPLEX LAWS OF SAVAGE LIFE.
But to believe that man in a savage state is endowed with freedom either of thought or action is erroneous in the highest degree. He is in reality subjected to complex laws which not only deprive him of all free agency of thought, but at the same time, by allowing no scope whatever for the development of intellect, benevolence, or any other great moral qualification, they necessarily bind him down in a hopeless state of barbarism from which it is impossible for man to emerge so long as he is enthralled by these customs; which, on the other hand, are so ingeniously devised as to have a direct tendency to annihilate any effort that is made to overthrow them.
This people reject in practice all idea of the equality of persons or classes; they make indeed no verbal distinctions upon this point, and if asked, were all men equal? they would be unable to comprehend the question; but there is no race that imposes more irksome restraints upon certain classes of the community.
CHARACTER OF THE NATIVE CUSTOMS. THEIR GENERALITY.
The whole tendency of their superstitions and traditional regulations is to produce the effect of depriving certain classes of benefits which are enjoyed by others; and this monopolizing of advantages often possesses amongst savages many characteristics which violate all the holier feelings of our nature, and excite a disgust of which it is divested in civilized life. In the latter case we see certain privileges even hereditarily enjoyed; but the weak and strong, the rich and poor, the young and old have paths of honourable ambition laid open to them by entering on which they can gain like immunities. While in the savage condition we find the female sex, the young, and the weak, condemned to a hopeless state of degradation and to a lasting deprivation of particular advantages merely because they are defenceless; and what they are deprived of is given to others merely because they are old or strong: and this is not effected by personal violence, depending upon momentary caprice and individual disposition (in which case it might be considered as the consequence of a state of equality) but it is enforced upon the natives of Australia by traditional laws and customs which are by them considered as valid and binding as our laws are by us.
CONSIDERATIONS ON THEIR ORIGIN.
The laws and customs alluded to cannot be considered as mere local institutions, for travellers and residents in the northern provinces of the colony of New South Wales describe as existing there usages nearly identical with those which regulate the proceedings of the natives occupying the west of the continent. And these testimonies cannot be doubted for they are incidentally introduced without any theoretical bias and in ignorance of the conformity they tend to prove. Natives from the country about the Murrumbidgee have described to me Australian customs as being in force there which exhibit the same accordance with those I found in the west; and I have myself ascertained their existence on several other portions of the continent. But it is remarkable that, although so many persons have described isolated customs of this people, no one has yet taken the trouble to digest them into one mass, and to exhibit them in the aggregate, so that an inference might be drawn as to how far the state in which the natives of Australia are at present found is caused by the institutions to which they are subjected.
We find then, in Australia, the remarkable fact that the inhabitants of a tract of country nearly two thousand miles in breadth are governed by the same institutions: and what renders this more singular is that the people submitted to them are not subjected by written rules of faith, which the chiefs of each race may interpret and modify according to their will; as is the case with those who are governed by the Koran or other similar codes; but in this instance mere oral traditions are handed down, which teach that certain rules of conduct are to be observed under certain penalties, and without the aid of fixed records, or the intervention of a succession of authorized depositaries and expounders these laws have been transmitted from father to son through unknown generations, and are fixed in the minds of the people as sacred and unalterable.